Kivy 1.8 is the first version of a popular open source Python framework to support Python 3.x.

Kivy, which is released under the MIT license and works on Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS and Raspberry Pi makes use of OpenGL to create a standardized UI and graphics environment for Python.

It lets you create apps that are multi-touch, react to gestures, and track objects and markers.

Up until now it's main drawback was lack of support for the Python 3.x branch and, as we reported, in 2012 the Python Software Foundation awarded the Kivy Foundation $5,000 for porting the core Kivy codebase together with a number of Kivy project dependencies (their Android and iOS tools) and a number of third-party dependencies (e.g., PIL, gstreamer, opencv) to Python 3.3 and this has now been achieved.

The other highlights of this release are:

New media player named GstPlayer, based on Gstreamer 1.0 used as a implementation for the Audio and Video core provider. This allow users access to the latest Gstreamer with all its improvements but also provides a common player for both Python 2.7 and 3.3 on desktop platforms.

Scrollview has been slightly enhanced to support smoother scrolling utilizing Matrix transformation by default. It also now supports scrolling through bars or content or both.